1. The British East India Company
-1757, when the decisive victory over the nawab of Bengal in the Battle of Plassey catapulted the British to ascendancy in Asia and, indeed, the world
-Crushing blow to the already weak of Mughal Empire, fortified the British East India Company as a political power within the subcontinent, and gave Britain access to enormous Indian wealth
-British assumed direct control of Bengal’s external trade
-British conquest thus transformed the Indian economy into a closed system, forcing India through taxation to effectively give away its exports to Britain and severing its independent trade connections with the outside world
-Commercialization of Indian agriculture led tot eh abandonment of subsistence farming, leaving the Indian peasantry more vulnerable than ever to famine
2. Further British Expansion in Asia
-Russia harbored imperial ambitions in the region of India
-In 1840s Britain annexed Punjab and Sind as buffer zones against the Russians
-When the British tried to do the same to Afghanistan, they met with stubborn resistance in the Afghan Wars of 1839-1842 and 1878-1880
-Kingdom of Burma (Myanmar) harassed the British on the northeastern frontier of the Indian Empire
B. The “Sick Men”: The Ottoman Empire and China
1. The Ottoman Empire
-While the predominantly Muslim identity of Ottoman subjects gave the empire some political and cultural cohesion, the ambitions of provincial governors were challenging the authority of the Sultan, Mahmud II
-Attempted to initiate a program of administrative, legal, and technological Westernization known as the Tanzimat (reorganization) reforms in the 1830s
-Ottoman dependency on Britain in 1838, when the sultan asked the British to intervene militarily to restore Ottoman control in Syria, which had been seized by the breakaway Ottoman province of Egypt in 1831
-In return for military assistance, the British and French demanded the full implementation of Tanzimat, along with trade privileges and extraterritorial judicial rights for themselves
-Ottoman Empire became a de facto economic colony of the British, forced to export raw materials (cotton, cereals, opium) to Britain and to import British manufactures (textiles, machinery) in large quantities
-During the Crimean War the Ottoman government borrowed money in extremely unfavorable terms from the French and the British to subsidize its military mobilization
-Formation of the Ottoman Public Debt Commission in 1881 formalized British and French control of the bankrupt Ottoman economy, including taxation, tariffs, and the provincial tribute system
2. China
-Ruling Qing Dynasty, members of the foreign Manchu minority who had ruled China since the mid-seventieth century, enjoyed considerable economic prosperity and sought to extend the boundaries of the empire in Asia
-Also exhibited no interest in European manufactures
-European merchants flooded the Chinese market with cheap Indian-produced opium, which they used to pay for Chinese goods, especially tea
-Chinese experience huge silver shortages as Europeans stopped paying for Chinese imports with metal specie, but opium addiction was debilitating large segments of Chinese society
-Emperor tried to gain control by blockading the port of Canton and seizing the opium supplies of foreign merchants, the British sent a naval force to defy him
-Opium War of 1840-1842 ended in Chinese defeat
-The Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong to Britain, gave the British trading rights in five ports, and forced the Chinese to pay an indemnity for the war
-A second Opium War fought over the same issues and ended in Chinese defeat and the ceding of extraterritorial rights, trading privileges, and missionary protection to Britain, France, the United States, and Russia
-British and French forces occupied Peking in 1860 and burned the emperor’s imperial gardens at the Summer Palace, while Russia obtained Vladivostock
-Bloody Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 further destabilized Chinese politics and society
-The Western-trained “Ever-Victorious Army” under the leadership of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, definitely quashed the rebellion, although sporadic resistance continued in parts of the country until 1868
C. Expansion in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim
1. Southeast Asia
-To safeguard the critical trade route between India and China, the British East India Company sought to establish fortified settlements in Southeast Asia from the 1780s on
-Dutch asked the British to oversee their Southeast Asian holdings during the French revolutionary occupation of the Netherlands starting in 1975
-British were in possession of the valuable ports of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore (known collectively as the Straits of Settlements)
-Charter Act of 1833, the British East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and the company’s interest in the India-China trade route waned sharply
-Interest in the region as a source of raw materials, investing in tin mining and rubber production
-In the 1820s and 1830s when the Siamese monarch abandoned a century-long isolationist policy and resumed relations with Europe, negotiating trade treaties and relinquishing some of Siam’s border territories in the interests of maintaining the kingdom’s political independence
2. The Pacific Rim
-The conquest of Australia and New Zealand and establishment of settler colonies there deviated sharply from the ideology of liberal paternalism and practices of economic imperialism that characterized European ventures abroad during the early nineteenth-century
-Instead it mirrored the conquest of the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in its strident frontier mentality, thirst for land, and unapologetic declimation of indigenous populations
-1840s as the first generations of free settlers offered cash incentives to try to induce more and more affluent Britons to emigrate
-Emigration soared after the Australian Gold Rush of 1851
-Over a million British citizens emigrated in the 1850s alone, most of them to Australia
-Preponderance of British-descended settlers in these colonies, known as “the White Dominions”
-1850s, Britain granted New Zealand and Australia limited autonomy
-Conferred Dominion status, a classification that offered domestic autonomy to the settler colonies but retained British control over foreign policy and trade
-In New Zealand, both the settlers and the British government signed the Waitangi Treaty in 1840 promising indigenous Maoris protection of their land rights, but the settlers quickly reneged on their promises
-British government ultimately intervened to savagely crush Maori resistance during the 1860s
3. Japan
-Once the American naval commander Commodore Matthew Perry induced the Japanese Tokugawa government to sign a treaty opening some of its ports to Western trade in 1854
-Meiji Restoration in 1868: Meiji leaders dismantled an essentially feudal system that had lasted for seven centuries by promoting rapid-fire industrialization of the economy and Westernizing key aspects of the government and educational system
D. The European Awakening to Africa
1. New Interest in Africa
-Formation of the African Association, dedicated to the British commercial expansion in Africa, reflected this sudden surge of awareness of Africa’s commercial potential
-Mungo Park, whose expeditions up the Niger River in West Central Africa in 1795 and 1805 brought him into contract with the sophisticated Fulani and Bambara states confirming hopes that Africa possessed the commercial infrastructure to become a significant British trading partner,
-Unlike the New World, where European strains of disease virtually obliterated indigenous peoples in Africa it was the local inhabitants who had the advantage
-Dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid, and above all, malaria decimated European visitors so predictably that nineteenth century Africa became widely known by the epithet “The White Man’s Grave”
-Africa’s topography with its jungles, deserts, and complex river systems impeded European access to the continent
-Steamboat facilitated the exploration of continental interiors by river
-Steamboats navigate independent of wind conditions and allowed them to travel against the current at high speeds
2. Missionaries and Explorers
-Missionaries, many of them abolitionist evangelicals seeking to end slavery in Africa, often ventured first into the African interior
-Stove to Europeanize native subjects whom they now saw as more primitive brethren
-Saw the cultivation of commerce and the conversion to Christianity as mutually reinforcing goals, since both were part of the overall civilizing process that would ultimately elevate non-Europeans to the level of Europeans
-David Livingstone, a missionary explorer who described his dual quest to open central Africa to commerce and religion in his book Missionary Travels (1857)
-Henry Stanley, an Anglo-American hired by the New York Herald to find Livingstone when the latter was thought to be missing in the Central Congo
-Stanley became and overnight celebrity with the publication of his great scoop, How I Found Livingstone (1872)
3. Expansion into the Interior
-French moved inland from the coastal city of Saint Louis into modern-day Senegal
-Also expanded from Algiers—conquered in a military invasion in 1830—into the Algerian interior
-Fighting a costly and difficult war with well-armed Algerian guerillas under the leadership of Abdelkader
-Fifteen thousand Afrikaners migrated north of the Orange River in the Great Trek of 1835-1845, fleeing British control and seeking land of their own
-By the late 1830s, had established independent Afrikaner republics in the Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal
-British cut the Afrikaners off from strategic coastal access and annexed the Natal province in 1843
-Although the British eventually recognized the sovereignty of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1854, they meddled continually in Bantu-Afrikaner conflicts
4. Clashes with African Powers
-In the 1820s the military genius Shaka Zulu built a powerful and extensive Zulu empire in the Natal region sparking major disturbances in Southern Africa
-Raiding armies also drove many other Bantu peoples, including the Ndebele, to seek refuge elsewhere
-The Zulus themselves also battled Afrikaners who migrated north into Zulu domination in 1837-1838, as well as the British, most notably in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1878-1879
-The latter marked the first defeat of a European power by an African Force in the Battle of Isandhlwana
-Fundamentally Islamic revival emerged among the Fulani people in West Africa
-Overthrowing the local Hausa chieftains, the Fulani established a decentralized state structure known as the Sokoto caliphate in 1809, which waged jihad—holy war—to impose Islam throughout the region
5. European Encroachment in Egypt
-Ottoman sultan lost control when Mohammed Ali, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army of reoccupation seized power
-Efforts to establish Egyptian autonomy were thwarted by the Sultan’s continued resistance and British and French commercial interests in Egypt
-Included constructing an Egyptian railway system from Alexandria to Cairo and building the Suez Canal connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea under Ferdinand Lessepi’s direction from 1859-1869
A. India and the Rise of British Sovereignty
1. The British East India Company
-1757, when the decisive victory over the nawab of Bengal in the Battle of Plassey catapulted the British to ascendancy in Asia and, indeed, the world
-Crushing blow to the already weak of Mughal Empire, fortified the British East India Company as a political power within the subcontinent, and gave Britain access to enormous Indian wealth
-British assumed direct control of Bengal’s external trade
-British conquest thus transformed the Indian economy into a closed system, forcing India through taxation to effectively give away its exports to Britain and severing its independent trade connections with the outside world
-Commercialization of Indian agriculture led tot eh abandonment of subsistence farming, leaving the Indian peasantry more vulnerable than ever to famine
2. Further British Expansion in Asia
-Russia harbored imperial ambitions in the region of India
-In 1840s Britain annexed Punjab and Sind as buffer zones against the Russians
-When the British tried to do the same to Afghanistan, they met with stubborn resistance in the Afghan Wars of 1839-1842 and 1878-1880
-Kingdom of Burma (Myanmar) harassed the British on the northeastern frontier of the Indian Empire
B. The “Sick Men”: The Ottoman Empire and China
1. The Ottoman Empire
-While the predominantly Muslim identity of Ottoman subjects gave the empire some political and cultural cohesion, the ambitions of provincial governors were challenging the authority of the Sultan, Mahmud II
-Attempted to initiate a program of administrative, legal, and technological Westernization known as the Tanzimat (reorganization) reforms in the 1830s
-Ottoman dependency on Britain in 1838, when the sultan asked the British to intervene militarily to restore Ottoman control in Syria, which had been seized by the breakaway Ottoman province of Egypt in 1831
-In return for military assistance, the British and French demanded the full implementation of Tanzimat, along with trade privileges and extraterritorial judicial rights for themselves
-Ottoman Empire became a de facto economic colony of the British, forced to export raw materials (cotton, cereals, opium) to Britain and to import British manufactures (textiles, machinery) in large quantities
-During the Crimean War the Ottoman government borrowed money in extremely unfavorable terms from the French and the British to subsidize its military mobilization
-Formation of the Ottoman Public Debt Commission in 1881 formalized British and French control of the bankrupt Ottoman economy, including taxation, tariffs, and the provincial tribute system
2. China
-Ruling Qing Dynasty, members of the foreign Manchu minority who had ruled China since the mid-seventieth century, enjoyed considerable economic prosperity and sought to extend the boundaries of the empire in Asia
-Also exhibited no interest in European manufactures
-European merchants flooded the Chinese market with cheap Indian-produced opium, which they used to pay for Chinese goods, especially tea
-Chinese experience huge silver shortages as Europeans stopped paying for Chinese imports with metal specie, but opium addiction was debilitating large segments of Chinese society
-Emperor tried to gain control by blockading the port of Canton and seizing the opium supplies of foreign merchants, the British sent a naval force to defy him
-Opium War of 1840-1842 ended in Chinese defeat
-The Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong to Britain, gave the British trading rights in five ports, and forced the Chinese to pay an indemnity for the war
-A second Opium War fought over the same issues and ended in Chinese defeat and the ceding of extraterritorial rights, trading privileges, and missionary protection to Britain, France, the United States, and Russia
-British and French forces occupied Peking in 1860 and burned the emperor’s imperial gardens at the Summer Palace, while Russia obtained Vladivostock
-Bloody Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 further destabilized Chinese politics and society
-The Western-trained “Ever-Victorious Army” under the leadership of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, definitely quashed the rebellion, although sporadic resistance continued in parts of the country until 1868
C. Expansion in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim
1. Southeast Asia
-To safeguard the critical trade route between India and China, the British East India Company sought to establish fortified settlements in Southeast Asia from the 1780s on
-Dutch asked the British to oversee their Southeast Asian holdings during the French revolutionary occupation of the Netherlands starting in 1975
-British were in possession of the valuable ports of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore (known collectively as the Straits of Settlements)
-Charter Act of 1833, the British East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and the company’s interest in the India-China trade route waned sharply
-Interest in the region as a source of raw materials, investing in tin mining and rubber production
-In the 1820s and 1830s when the Siamese monarch abandoned a century-long isolationist policy and resumed relations with Europe, negotiating trade treaties and relinquishing some of Siam’s border territories in the interests of maintaining the kingdom’s political independence
2. The Pacific Rim
-The conquest of Australia and New Zealand and establishment of settler colonies there deviated sharply from the ideology of liberal paternalism and practices of economic imperialism that characterized European ventures abroad during the early nineteenth-century
-Instead it mirrored the conquest of the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in its strident frontier mentality, thirst for land, and unapologetic declimation of indigenous populations
-1840s as the first generations of free settlers offered cash incentives to try to induce more and more affluent Britons to emigrate
-Emigration soared after the Australian Gold Rush of 1851
-Over a million British citizens emigrated in the 1850s alone, most of them to Australia
-Preponderance of British-descended settlers in these colonies, known as “the White Dominions”
-1850s, Britain granted New Zealand and Australia limited autonomy
-Conferred Dominion status, a classification that offered domestic autonomy to the settler colonies but retained British control over foreign policy and trade
-In New Zealand, both the settlers and the British government signed the Waitangi Treaty in 1840 promising indigenous Maoris protection of their land rights, but the settlers quickly reneged on their promises
-British government ultimately intervened to savagely crush Maori resistance during the 1860s
3. Japan
-Once the American naval commander Commodore Matthew Perry induced the Japanese Tokugawa government to sign a treaty opening some of its ports to Western trade in 1854
-Meiji Restoration in 1868: Meiji leaders dismantled an essentially feudal system that had lasted for seven centuries by promoting rapid-fire industrialization of the economy and Westernizing key aspects of the government and educational system
D. The European Awakening to Africa
1. New Interest in Africa
-Formation of the African Association, dedicated to the British commercial expansion in Africa, reflected this sudden surge of awareness of Africa’s commercial potential
-Mungo Park, whose expeditions up the Niger River in West Central Africa in 1795 and 1805 brought him into contract with the sophisticated Fulani and Bambara states confirming hopes that Africa possessed the commercial infrastructure to become a significant British trading partner,
-Unlike the New World, where European strains of disease virtually obliterated indigenous peoples in Africa it was the local inhabitants who had the advantage
-Dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid, and above all, malaria decimated European visitors so predictably that nineteenth century Africa became widely known by the epithet “The White Man’s Grave”
-Africa’s topography with its jungles, deserts, and complex river systems impeded European access to the continent
-Steamboat facilitated the exploration of continental interiors by river
-Steamboats navigate independent of wind conditions and allowed them to travel against the current at high speeds
2. Missionaries and Explorers
-Missionaries, many of them abolitionist evangelicals seeking to end slavery in Africa, often ventured first into the African interior
-Stove to Europeanize native subjects whom they now saw as more primitive brethren
-Saw the cultivation of commerce and the conversion to Christianity as mutually reinforcing goals, since both were part of the overall civilizing process that would ultimately elevate non-Europeans to the level of Europeans
-David Livingstone, a missionary explorer who described his dual quest to open central Africa to commerce and religion in his book Missionary Travels (1857)
-Henry Stanley, an Anglo-American hired by the New York Herald to find Livingstone when the latter was thought to be missing in the Central Congo
-Stanley became and overnight celebrity with the publication of his great scoop, How I Found Livingstone (1872)
3. Expansion into the Interior
-French moved inland from the coastal city of Saint Louis into modern-day Senegal
-Also expanded from Algiers—conquered in a military invasion in 1830—into the Algerian interior
-Fighting a costly and difficult war with well-armed Algerian guerillas under the leadership of Abdelkader
-Fifteen thousand Afrikaners migrated north of the Orange River in the Great Trek of 1835-1845, fleeing British control and seeking land of their own
-By the late 1830s, had established independent Afrikaner republics in the Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal
-British cut the Afrikaners off from strategic coastal access and annexed the Natal province in 1843
-Although the British eventually recognized the sovereignty of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1854, they meddled continually in Bantu-Afrikaner conflicts
4. Clashes with African Powers
-In the 1820s the military genius Shaka Zulu built a powerful and extensive Zulu empire in the Natal region sparking major disturbances in Southern Africa
-Raiding armies also drove many other Bantu peoples, including the Ndebele, to seek refuge elsewhere
-The Zulus themselves also battled Afrikaners who migrated north into Zulu domination in 1837-1838, as well as the British, most notably in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1878-1879
-The latter marked the first defeat of a European power by an African Force in the Battle of Isandhlwana
-Fundamentally Islamic revival emerged among the Fulani people in West Africa
-Overthrowing the local Hausa chieftains, the Fulani established a decentralized state structure known as the Sokoto caliphate in 1809, which waged jihad—holy war—to impose Islam throughout the region
5. European Encroachment in Egypt
-Ottoman sultan lost control when Mohammed Ali, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army of reoccupation seized power
-Efforts to establish Egyptian autonomy were thwarted by the Sultan’s continued resistance and British and French commercial interests in Egypt
-Included constructing an Egyptian railway system from Alexandria to Cairo and building the Suez Canal connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea under Ferdinand Lessepi’s direction from 1859-1869